Daily Manna · Day 328 · November 24
Following to Know
“Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.”
Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.
It is a beautiful sentence and it repays slow reading. Knowing God is put in the same grammar as walking: not a flash of clarity you can put on a shelf, but the pressing on, and the knowing arrives inside the going. And the two pictures Hosea reaches for are the two most dependable things a farming people had. Sunrise, which is not a mood of the sky but a fixed appointment. And rain in its season, early and late, the arrival you can plan a year around.
Now read what comes next, because it changes who is speaking. Verse four: O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away. God answers the speech, and he answers it with the same weather. They said he would come like the morning. He says their devotion burns off like the morning.
Which means these lovely words are a quotation. Verses one to three are the people's own repentance speech, worked up and well phrased, and God's reply is that the phrasing was not the problem. They had the theology right. Come, and let us return unto the LORD, they said, and every word of it was true, and none of it lasted past breakfast.
So the sentence is not spoiled; it is aimed. The whole weight of it falls on four words that are easy to read past: if we follow on. What is being tested in this passage is not whether God comes like the rain. It is whether the people who said so were still there in a week.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 328 is Aaron's Beard (Psalm 133:1).